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This site provides a stylish way to produce instant media rich web pages, polls and invites in seconds. Just choose the text, images, videos and link you want to show and publish it. Give out short link to share with others. You can also set an expiry date for your site. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

This is how you link to a specific starting point in a YouTube video. Basically, just add #t=XmYs to the end of the video URL.  X is the number of minutes and Y is the seconds you want skipped when the video is viewed.

Right after posting this, I realized there is now a Share option on the YouTube site that you can use to make this even easier. While viewing the YouTube video: 1) pause the video at the point where you want others to start watching, 2) click the Share button, 3) click options (directly under the link), 4) put a check in the Start at box, and finally 5) copy the link provided by YouTube. Note that you can also type in the start at time as minutes:seconds. The #t part of the link that makes the video start at the spot you specified is included in the link.

Second of two great YouTube Playlists with over 200 explanations of how Chinese characters have evolved over time. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Mandarin+%26+Chinese+culture

A great site which has a vast amount of English language resources for both native and learners of English as a second language. Sections include business English, grammar, games and more. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/English+As+An+Additional+Language

The second part in the series for lifetime. It will be on my blog next week but if you read part one yesterday, here is part two!

John Seely Brown's PDF on the new learning environments for the 21st century based upon a 2005 presentation he did at the Forum of Higher Education's 2005 Aspen symposium. This is an important read. (of course many of you have already read it.) If you wonder why I'm digging into the research, it is as I work on my second book on collaborative writing. It is amazing to me that I can find so many more things online than I ever could in the Georgia Tech library when I was a research assistant for the then president of the national Economics Association, Dr. Danny Boston. I may not be in an institution of higher learning but I can institute higher learning in my daily practice. I want everything I write for publication to be well grounded. I hope that is why those of you who gift me with your presence on this blog will feel free to let me know in the comments if you have concerns or pointers to other work.

This 2004 study on second-language writers determined that although students prefer oral feedback that e-feedback has a greater impact on the revisions process. Online feedback is a valuable tool in the revisions process.

This is the second in a set of featured articles on the best iPad apps for the classroom. Be sure to check out last week's '65+ iPad Apps Perfect For Elementary Schools' and stay tuned for more great app lists and resources! 

The ubermix is an all-free, specially built, Linux-based operating system designed from the ground up with the needs of education in mind. Built by educators with an eye towards student and teacher empowerment, ubermix takes all the complexity out of student devices by making them as reliable and easy-to-use as a cell phone, without sacrificing the power and capabilities of a full operating system. With a turn-key, 5 minute installation, 20 second quick recovery mechanism, and more than 60 free applications pre-installed, ubermix turns whatever hardware you have into a powerful device for learning. via James T. Sanders

This is a superb online recording tool where you can make a 30 second audio recoding at the touch of a button. Just share the short link to share your message. There are apps for mobile devices and a bookmarklet for quick access. It's a wonderful way to give homework/instructions and for students to ask questions when away from class. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Music%2C+Sound+%26+Podcasts

This is an app and website from the creators of YouTube. It's a video creation platform where users shoot up to 16 seconds of video on their mobile device and mix it up collaboratively online into a feature film of up to an hour in length. Imagine a swarm of camera all capturing video for a collaborative project! http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Video%2C+animation%2C+film+%26+Webcams

Don't let the title mislead you, but yes, there are many uses of Minecraft in schools.This versatile, compelling but pretty low bandwidth tool gives us so many things Second Life never did - and with minecraft.edu it is affordable for most of us. This list is trending on Twitter which just shows how many people are interested (or how many people don't read to know it isn't really 1001 ;-) You might just find one way to teach coding in your classroom for the Hour of Code coming up.

Tinkering works. Read Sylvia Martinez and Gary Stager's book "Invent to Learn" which talks about tinkering and how to use Maker Spaces to promote it to learn more. Great points from Lifehacker: "Research in the science of learning shows that hands-on building projects help young people conceptualize ideas and understand issues in greater depth. In an experiment described in the International Journal of Engineering Education in 2009, for example, one group of eighth-graders was taught about water resources in the traditional way: classroom lectures, handouts and worksheets. Meanwhile, a group of their classmates explored the same subject by designing and constructing a water purification device. The students in the second group learned the material better: they knew more about the importance of clean drinking water and how it is produced, and they engaged in deeper and more complex thinking in response to open-ended questions on water resources and water quality... it involves a loose process of trying things out, seeing what happens, reflecting and evaluating, and trying again."

"Spies with surveillance agencies in the United States and United Kingdom may have spent time undercover as orcs and blood elves, infiltrating video games like "World of Warcraft" in a hunt for terrorists "hiding in plain sight" online." I find this very believable for this reason. I had a student in Teen Second life several years a go and he came across a "meeting" of sorts that was obviously something very strange. When he tried to interact with the players they had a way to throw him out and port him other places. It was obviously some sort of strange thing happening. I have no doubt that games are just another way to have "secret" meetings for those who want to hide. That said, it would be hard to tell the difference between those gaming and those doing other things as the games themselves have people plotting and planning so I'm thinking the language used would be hard to separate the real world from the game itself, which, in some ways makes it the perfect way to hide in plain sight.

Another MOOC for English Language teaching. "After its enormously successful first massive open online course (MOOC) for English language teaching (ELT) entitled ELT Techniques: Vocabulary, WizIQ has announced that it will host the second in the series, ELT Techniques: Listening and Pronunciation. Created and overseen by Jason R Levine (also known as Fluency MC), the MOOC will begin on November 18, 2013 and feature numerous leaders and innovators in the field, including Sean Banville, Jennifer Lebedev, Paul Maglione, Chuck Sandy, Rachel Smith and Shelley Terell."

Peggy Sheehy is the matron of gamification and she's one upped her own groundbreaking work in Second Life. She's gamified the Common Core Learning Standards. Wow. One more reason you can't use standards as an excuse to do nothing. "They are also learning to be mighty gamers because Sheehy is gamifying the Common Core Learning Standards (CCLS). With the command "Go forth and be epic," students pack away drafts and log on to 3D Game Lab where A Hero's Journey awaits. WoWinSchool: A Hero's Journey is a curriculum based in World of Warcraft (WoW), a massively multiplayer online role-playing game in which players assume characters and interact within an ever-changing, virtual world.  Sheehy helped to frame the curriculum developed by Lucas Gillespie and Craig Lawson with whom she collaborates on the award-winning WoWInSchool project.  "

"we also have a third drive. We do things because they're interesting, because they're engaging, because they're the right things to do, because they contribute to the world. The problem is that, especially in our organizations, we stop at that second drive. We think the only reason people do productive things is to snag a carrot or avoid a stick."

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Here's a roundup of the APIs to mine Twitter data: Trstrank: The PageRank-esque algorithm we covered previouslyWordbag: A list of "most common words" for a user with a twist. Universally-common words are essentially filtered out because InfoChimps compares a user's word choice to all of Twitter.Influence: Gets the number of replies in and out for the user, along wiht the number of tweets and the age of the account. Analysis of influence is up to you.Conversation: Provides a summary of public interactions between two users. Results are a list of tweets in which the first user replied to the second.